Friends Like This

May 21, 2004

Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the warm welcome American troops could expect from liberated Iraqis. They responded in kind, picturing Mr. Chalabi -- who has lived most of his life outside Iraq and who was convicted in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud -- as exactly the kind of secular Shiite to lead a new, democratic Iraq. Now reality has come crashing down on both sides, and the friendship has crumbled along with self-delusion.

Yesterday, American and Iraqi security forces raided and ransacked Mr. Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad, supposedly as part of an investigation into still-unspecified offenses. Earlier in the week, the United States halted the monthly $335,000 payments it had been giving to the Iraqi National Congress, the Chalabi political organization. The money was supposed to be for intelligence gathering, and it had continued to flow even after it had become apparent that much of the information Mr. Chalabi had produced was dead wrong. He was one of the chief cheerleaders for the theory that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell's disastrous misstatements to the United Nations about mobile weapons labs in Iraq now seem to have been based on fabrications by an informer linked to Mr. Chalabi.

Lately, Mr. Chalabi -- who has no genuine political base -- has concluded that anti-Americanism is the key to political popularity. He is also an opponent of Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations official whom the United States is counting on to form a new Iraqi government by June 30. As the Chalabi and American interests diverged, the relationship naturally soured. Nevertheless, the sight of American-controlled forces smashing their way into the home of a leading politician, even one this unappetizing, was troubling. American authorities' claims that it was an Iraqi operation were implausible; they failed to explain who would order the police to attack a member of the Governing Council because the interior minister said he had not.

Many people in the Bush administration have been growing angry at the way Mr. Chalabi keeps biting the hand that fed him so well for so long. Some of them also say the rosy picture he and his fellow exiles drew of Iraqis' welcoming the American troops along those never-seen flower-strewn highways contributed to one of the most disastrous miscalculations of the war: Donald Rumsfeld's decision to send too few troops to secure the country after Saddam Hussein fled.

There's little to recommend Mr. Chalabi as a politician, or certainly as an informer. But he can't be made a scapegoat. The Bush administration should have known what it was doing when it gave enormous credence to a questionable character whose own self-interest was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld desperately wanted to prove his theories of light warfare, and everyone in the White House, with their eyes on that big tax-cut plan, wanted to believe that Iraq was as the exiles said: practically begging to be invaded, and possible to run on the cheap.

Even at this late date, it's good to see that Washington is distancing itself from the man who is the symbol of all those disastrous blunders. But so far, the ham-handed raid seems only to have given the opportunistic Mr. Chalabi, with his absurd ''let my people go'' sound bite yesterday, a way to portray himself as a martyred Iraqi patriot.